Monday, March 19, 2007

I've been a terrible blogger lately. I have plenty of excuses, sure: I was in and out of town; I had a catastrophic motherboard failure; I felt obligated to watch about six hundred NCAA basketball games. But none of that makes me feel any less guilty about failing you, my loyal readers (ha!). I've been keeping up with the news, mind you; I just haven't actually be posting any of it. So here's a lengthy rundown* of the notable news articles and blog posts that I've read in the past week and a half, organized roughly by topic. And now that I'm back in town full-time; now that I've constructed an acceptable workaround until my new motherboard arrives; now that the first two rounds of the NCAA tournament are over... I'll try to spend some time here more regularly.

  • Richardson
  • Walter Reed
    • 3.8. AMERICAblog on the CQ article indicating that senior Republicans knew about the situation at Walter Reed long before they let on.
  • Environment
    • 3.8. There was a lot of talk amongst the big lefty bloggers about this article, which reports on government scientists who were told not to discuss climate change (or polar bears).
  • Libby
    • 3.8. One of Kos's contributing editors makes a good point regarding the feasibility of a Scooter Libby pardon: you usually have to wait five years.
  • Edwards
    • 3.8. Ezra Klein at TAPPED points out that while Edwards's coming out against the FNC Nevada debate was a "good thing," it probably wasn't a smart move for Edwards personally, since it's likely to set him up as a pretty severe Fox punching bag if he makes it far enough that it becomes worthwhile for them to start punching him. (I think this is probably slightly less true now that the debate has collapsed so spectacularly. But they have long memories, those elephants.)
  • U.S. Attorneys
    • 3.8. Arlen Specter becomes the first Republican to rake the Attorney General across the coals.
    • 3.12. Chuck Schumer wants Karl Rove to testify.
    • 3.13. Dan Bartlett: "The White House did not play a role in the list of the seven U.S. Attorneys."
    • 3.16. TPM has put together a great timeline of the whole U.S. Attorney thing. (They also ask what Rove knew when.)
  • Military
    • 3.9. The American Prospect writes about military reservists and the Montgomery GI Bill.
    • 3.13. The fact that Gen. Peter Pace thinks homosexuality is immoral did not surprise me. The fact that Sen. John Warner thinks it's not, did.
  • Coulter
    • 3.9. A great editorial on Coulter from a small paper in DeKalb, Illinois. One of the things that annoyed me most about the initial responses from the major political campaigns (on both sides of the aisle) is that they were all framed in terms of "that kind of language has no place in political discourse." That's undeniably true, but it seems like we ought to go further than that; as the editorial above notes, "What she said was wrong and hurtful and stepped way beyond the line of human decency, much less political commentary."
  • Abortion
    • 3.12. A good post from TAPPED on a major logic problem for the pro-life right: "But as John Paul Stevens has pointed out, this position is completely nonsensical; it's absurd to argue that a woman has a fundamental right in choosing to become pregnant before the fact but only a trivial interest in choosing whether to become pregnant after the fact. The state's interest is greater after the fact, but the way abortion laws are written and enforced makes it almost impossible to argue that this interest could trump a fundamental right, which is why most opponents of Roe deny that a woman's right to choose an abortion is a fundamental right at all."
  • Hagel
    • 3.9. Interesting fact: Chuck Hagel promised during his 1996 Senate campaign to term-limit himself to 12 years.
    • 3.12. Chuck Hagel announces... nothing. Pundits agree: that was quite a waste of time.
  • Plame
    • 3.16. Valerie Plame testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. I didn't get to watch it, but everything I read seems to indicate that she was quite damning. (AMERICAblog has an assortment of clips.)
* - Color-coded expression of the danger that The Purple State is becoming more of a disjointed series of links than a blog: Orange (Elevated).

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